The yellow-bellied sapsucker is, at this time of year, one of our most
abundant woodpeckers, and in its life we have an excellent example of that
individuality which is ever cropping out in Nature--the trial and
acceptance of life under new conditions.
In the spring we tap the sugar maples, and gather great pailfuls of the
sap as it rises from its winter resting-place in the roots, and the
sapsucker likes to steal from our pails or to tap the trees for himself.
But throughout part of the year he is satisfied with an insect diet and
chooses the time when the sap begins to flow downward in the autumn for
committing his most serious depredations upon the tree. It was formerly
thought that this bird, like its near relatives, the downy and hairy
woodpeckers, was forever boring for insects; but when we examine the
regularity and symmetry of the arrangement of its holes, we realise that
they are for a very different purpose than the exposing of an occasional
grub.
Besides drinking the sap from the holes, this bird extracts a quantity of
the tender inner bark of the tree, and when a tree has been encircled for
several feet up and down its trunk by these numerous little sap wells, the
effect becomes apparent in the lessened circulation of the liquid blood of
the tree; and before long, death is certain to ensue. So the work of the
sapsucker is injurious, while the grub-seeking woodpeckers confer only
good upon the trees they frequent.
And how pitiful is the downfall of a doomed tree! Hardly has its vitality
been lessened an appreciable amount, when somehow the word is passed to
the insect hordes who hover about in waiting, as wolves hang upon the
outskirts of a herd of buffalo. In the spring, when the topmost branches
have received a little less than their wonted amount of wholesome sap and
the leaves are less vigorous, the caterpillars and twig-girdlers attack at
once. Ichneumen flies and boring beetles seem to know by signs invisible
to us that here is opportunity. Then in the fall come again the sapsuckers
to the tree, remorselessly driving hole after hole through the still
untouched segments of its circle of life. When the last sap-channel is
pierced and no more can pass to the roots, the tree stands helpless,
waiting for the end. Swiftly come frost and rain, and when the April suns
again quicken all the surrounding vegetation into vigorous life, the
victim of the sapsuckers stands lifeless, its branches reaching hopelessly
upward, a naked mockery amid the warm green foliage around. Insects and
fungi and lightning now set to work unhindered, and the tree falls at
last,--dust to dust--ashes to ashes.
A sapsucker has been seen in early morning to sink forty or fifty wells
into the bark of a mountain ash tree, and then to spend the rest of the
day in sidling from one to another, taking a sip here and a drink there,
gradually becoming more and more lethargic and drowsy, as if the sap
actually produced some narcotic or intoxicating effect. Strong indeed is
the contrast between such a picture and the same bird in the early
spring,--then full of life and vigour, drawing musical reverberations from
some resonant hollow limb.
Like other idlers, the sapsucker in its deeds of gluttony and harm brings,
if anything, more injury to others than to itself. The farmers well know
its depredations and detest it accordingly, but unfortunately they are not
ornithologists, and a peckerwood is a peckerwood to them; and so while the
poor downy, the red-head, and the hairy woodpeckers are seen busily at
work cutting the life threads of the injurious borer larvae, the farmer,
thinking of his dying trees, slays them all without mercy or distinction.
The sapsucker is never as confiding as the downy, and from a safe distance
sees others murdered for sins which are his alone.
But we must give sapsucker his due and admit that he devours many hundreds
of insects throughout the year, and though we mourn the death of an
occasional tree, we cannot but admire his new venture in life,--his
cunning in choosing only the dessert served at the woodpeckers'
feasts,--the sweets which flow at the tap of a beak, leaving to his
fellows the labour of searching and drilling deep for more substantial
courses.